Hey! It's J3 here. This will be my NaNoWriMo project- which I am aware doesn't start until November. However, I work retail and November is busy, plus I am literally my managers go-to bitch for extra hours and extra tasks. I will still write (or at least try) to hit 50k in November, but I wanted to get it started. ASP has been written and scrapped three times. I am trying, the block is real. Office Hours will happen soon too. I haven't forgotten about Hallelujah or SDS, either. I need time and sleep and not to have to have multiple surgeries. Anyways, enjoy my Greek inspired fic: Born of the Gods: The House of Hades!
Hades felt it. He felt every single fiber of his realm shake. His throne tremored beneath him. It was unlike anything he'd ever felt. The entirety of the underworld moved with the fervor of one of his wretched brother's earthquakes, but he knew it had to be more than that. The shake was felt all the way into Elysium, even into the Isles of the Blest, where those who had achieved moral greatness in their mortal, human lives, got to live out the rest of eternity. The humans now equated it with "heaven," but Hades knew his realm was much more complicated than that.
The fields of Asphodel rocked with the jolt as well. Those humans of mediocrity and neutral evil didn't look surprised; nothing much surprised them anymore. Every bit of fight had been drawn out of them because of the eons they had spent paying for living their lives in the most lukewarm way possible. They had not the blessings of those in Elysium, or the torture that those in the fields of punishment endured. They were solidly in the middle, something that disgusted Hades more so than true evil or true good.
But what was even more disturbing was the fact that this force had shook all the way down to the deepest, darkest belly of the pit: Tartarus, where Hades had damned various forms of humans and monsters alike to live out the rest of their days in personal forms of endless torment. Any sort of pip or even a movement from the pit was not one to be taken lightly, any sort of jolt made him, Hades, the oldest and truest god of the dead, deeply uneasy. He tried to shake the feeling, but he couldn't, it wasn't possible. He also knew that he would be blamed for this. It was always his fault. When something went wrong on Olympus or in the mortal world, Zeus always found a way to blame him. He took a deep breath; clutching at the glass in his hand, a mixture of blood and wine in his cold hands. As he took another sip from the goblet, just as the drink was on his lips, so were three names. Sorin. Josu. Liliana.
Poseidon felt the shake, just like his elder brother, though he didn't know that Hades had felt it as well. He was sure that the whole of his underground sea was going to be a sunken, hollow hole. He knew his brothers, both Zeus and Hades and possibly their children were the most apt to blame him for the quake, though that wasn't truthfully what it was. He was the father of earthquakes of course, but this was more, far more. They would be fools not to have not to felt or noticed the power behind it, almost like a supernova imploding upon itself. His realm, his waters, were used to the shakes and tremors of the earth and the motion of the ocean. But the God of the sea, the master of the depths and of the waves knew that something had gone horribly awry, something bigger than himself or either of his brothers, or any of them together, even. Poseidon didn't know what his brothers had felt, or if they even truly did, but he knew that the winter solstice was far too far away. This meeting would have to happen in the here and the now.
He also knew that, like always, he would serve as the mediator, the one true neutral in the situations between Hades and Zeus. There were situations that were eons upon eons old and would never end, and then there were events of the recent past that had left Zeus seething. The tensions between the gods of the earth, the sun and the underworld and death was at an all time high. Poseidon had no demigod children, only one daughter, a merfolk named Kiora, whom he had made the guardian of the new seas when the polar ice caps started to melt. The climate of the mortal world was changing, regardless of how much Poseidon tried to stop it, it kept going. He knew that didn't matter to Zeus, tough. If his realm encroached upon Zeus' in any way, there would be an all out war that the world, neither mortal nor eternal could survive
Zeus felt it, and with it he felt the white hot, burning anger as pure as the taste of his master bolt burning through him, coursing through every vein in his body. He knew that this was just another stunt of his brother's, another ploy for power on Hades' part, it had to be, just as he had stolen Nahiri to be some pagan concubine for his vampiric, disgusting son.
Zeus also knew that there were few upon the council of the twelve, the council of the Pantheon and the hearth that he could depend on, and only one that he trusted implicitly, if only for her intellect and wisdom. She'd yet to steer him wrong in millenia. He needed her wisdom and would be seeking her counsel, because the sheer power of the cracked, shaken earth wasn't something that Poseidon was behind, nor was it something that he could contain. Without any doubts in his mind, he knew that Poseidon would try to mediate , but the situation was out of the meddlesome sea god's hands. His champion, his uncorrupted, pure champion would be his ears and eyes into the mortal world for as long as he needed her to be. And so would Athena's son. He bore her mark. Just as he owned Elspeth, as he had given her his true blessing, Jace was Athena's. He had no choice, a fact he mulled over in his head many a time, turning his master bolt over in his hands, just as at the same time, Hades was clutching a glass, Poseidon a trident. But still, one fact remained.
He had no choice.
He bore her mark.